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February 1, 2007

W has failed the Democracies of both the US and Middle East.

By winston

Whatever the reason for the Iraq War was-"whatever Congress voted for", W has failed. In his speeches, including his state of the union addresses, W is always lying about Iraq and we likely heard some whoppers in his most recent one, but we won't know what they are until the lies become apparent. As a consequence of lying about the pre-war Iraq intelligence, W has failed the Democracies of both the US and Middle East.

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GOP Senator Warner's appeal for sanity declaration, which condemns W's surge, is titled "Resolution expressing the sense of Congress on the new strategy in Iraq" can be seen at http://warner.senate.gov/pressoffice/pressreleases/20070122a.htm and contains "Whereas, we respect the Constitutional authorities given a President in Article II, Section 2, which states that "The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States;" it is not the intent of this resolution to question or contravene such authority, but to accept the offer to Congress made by the President on January 10, 2007 that, "if members have improvements that can be made, we will make them. If circumstances change, we will adjust." Warner is saying that the Congress didn't give W an open-ended authority to fight GWOT and further stated "the Senate disagrees with the "plan" to augment our forces by 21,500, and urges the President instead to consider all options and alternatives for achieving the strategic goals set forth below with reduced force levels than proposed." Warner stated that W wasn't authorized to use the US military to fight a civil war in Iraq, and doing so was futile, especially an ages old one as "I have great concern about the American G.I. being thrust into that situation, the origins of which sometimes go back over a thousand years." In his recent state of the union 43 looked us in the eye and lied to us again. Time will prove his surge to be just as duplicitous as his "16 words"! Bush said to the Congress "I have spoken with many of you in person. I respect you and the arguments you've made. We went into this largely united, in our assumptions and in our convictions. And whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure." What does that mean? Can't the Congress know what they voted for? Doesn't W know of the Powell Doctrine? If he had followed that Doctrine of W's original Secretary of State, our military would know what their goals were. W has muddied the water so much regarding Iraq words have little value anymore. He never defined what winning in Iraq was. Every remark W makes, including all of his state of the union addresses, is merely propaganda. Addressing the hypocrisy with the Democratic version of the sense of Congress on the new strategy in Iraq is Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, who in the article "Biden: 'Failed Policy' Emboldens Enemy" at http://www.comcast.net/news/index.jsp?cat=GENERAL&fn=/2007/01/28/572863.html&cvq h=itn_biden "dismissed criticism that a resolution opposing a troop buildup in Iraq would embolden the enemy and estimated perhaps only 20 senators believe President Bush "is headed in the right direction." "It's not the American people or the U.S. Congress who are emboldening the enemy. It's the failed policy of this president _ going to war without a strategy, going to war prematurely." What is likely to happen if the additional 21,500 US troops go to Iraq? The article "Gates Working to Accelerate Deployment" at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/26/AR2007012601208.html states "On upcoming U.S. and Iraqi military operations to secure Baghdad, Gates said that while they could lead to increased U.S. troop casualties, another possibility is that many of the Shiite militia and other fighters "will go to ground in the hope that they can just outwait us and filter back once we're gone." What can the US do to avert that failure? Create a bloodbath of staggering proportions as Gates states "To address that concern, he said the goal was for U.S. forces to help drive the violence in Baghdad down to the point where it "would be entirely manageable by the Iraqi army that would be there for a protracted period of time." We'd be inclined to believe that if W's surge plan could be labeled a "hidden agenda", then it wasn't being prompted by higher ideals. What if it was really just a façade to allow the Shiites to decimate the Sunnis and then steal the oil profits from the Sunni genocide victims? The article "Tearing a nation in two" at http://article.wn.com/view/2006/08/09/Tearing_a_nation_in_two/ states "Leaders of Iraq's powerful Shiite Muslim political bloc have begun aggressively promoting a radical plan to partition the country as a way of separating the warring sects. Some Iraqis are even talking about dividing the capital, with the Tigris River as a kind of Berlin Wall. ...And the new constitution does allow provinces to team up into federal regions. But the latest effort, promulgated by Cabinet ministers, clerics and columnists, marks the first time they have advocated regional partition as a way of stemming violence. "Federalism will cut off all parts of the country that are incubating terrorism from those that are upgrading and improving," said Khudair Khuzaie, the Shiite education minister. "We will do it just like Kurdistan. We will put soldiers along the frontiers." Why doesn't the US back partitioning? Why was that option that could have reduced the bloodshed never even considered by the Iraq Study Group? The article "Iraq Group a Study In Secrecy, Centrism" at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/25/AR2006112500886_ pf.html shows how W's surrogate, Baker, geared his panel to get at an option favoring the GOP as "Brookings Institution fellow Michael E. O'Hanlon advocates the "soft partition" of Iraq's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities with land swaps and help with housing and jobs, so people could relocate to places where they are less threatened. He said he wishes he had testified before the panel so that his suggestion was not filtered out. "Some good ideas were killed in the cradle," he said." Maybe W's real motive is to maintain permanent US bases near the Middle East oil. Remember that during the run-up to the war that Wolfowitz inadvertently told the truth and uttered the phrase that the factor differentiating Iraq from other problems areas for the US interests was that Iraq was above a "sea of oil". That wasn't an isolated remark in fact the "Project for the New American Century" the hated PNAC at http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqsep1898.htm had a "MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS" of September 18, 1998 which stated " A strategy for supporting this enormous latent opposition to Saddam requires political and economic as well as military components. It is eminently possible for a country that possesses the overwhelming power that the United States has in the Gulf. The heart of such action would be to create a liberated zone in Southern Iraq comparable to what the United States and its partners did so successfully in the North in 1991. Establishing a safe protected zone in the South, where opposition to Saddam could rally and organize, would make it possible... • For that provisional government to control the largest oil field in Iraq and make available to it, under some kind of appropriate international supervision, enormous financial resources for political, humanitarian and eventually military purposes" So, prior to W's knowledge of the matter PNAC supported the 80% solution, with the Sunnis being the 20% which the US would allow to be decimated. You wonder if "the intellectually incurious" one is even aware of the history of his brutal Oval Office's plan to allow the genocide of 5.2 million Sunni Iraqis? Fast forward to today and the article "Lethal-Force Order Justified, Bush Says" at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/26/AR2007012601050_ pf.html describes how W can widen the war and keep us bogged down in the Iraq quagmire. The article states "Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said that U.S. troops must defend themselves in Iraq but that the president needs congressional approval for any program that could "escalate this conflict" with Iran. Reid said Bush should be engaged in direct diplomacy with Iran and other countries in the region to avoid a widening conflict, rather than "sending battle carrier groups" to sit off the Iranian coast." Warner's resolution is concerned about W's misuse of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution ("AUMF") of September 18, 2001. The joint resolution authorized the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the attacks on September 11, 2001. Somehow or other W has misused this for a variety of criminal activities, such as his NSA illegal eavesdropping on US citizens, and both the current Democratic and GOP resolutions regarding the new strategy in Iraq are wary of W misusing again to attack Iran. What could have been W's true "ulterior motive"? Whatever it was he failed, thus aiding extremist jihadists. The article's headline "War's Arab Supporters Bitter Over Its Results" at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/21/AR2007012101282_pf.html is self-explanatory. Lebanese journalist Michael Young regarding a stunned Middle East stated "If they were scared of what was happening in Baghdad, there was more power in this moment than might have been expected. The regimes were truly scared of this moment, truly scared. The problem is the Americans failed." "It's a success story for al-Qaeda, a success story for autocratic Arab regimes that made democracy look ugly in their people's eyes. They can say to their people: 'Look at the democracy that the Americans want to bring to you. Democracy is trouble. You may as well forget about what the Americans promise you. They promise you death,' "said Salameh Nematt, a Jordanian analyst and the former Washington bureau chief for the Arabic-language daily newspaper al Hayat." PNAC was dismantled as "If the future and coming two to three years are negative, and what is sought after fails, the legacy will be a disaster, one of the first major disasters of the 21st century," said Shafeeq Ghabra, a political science professor at Kuwait University." If bone-headed "bubble boy" had kept his troops in Afghanistan and attacking the terrorists who caused 9/11 then al-Zawahri wouldn't be able to send threatening tapes out. W's stupid "Bring em on" remark was thrown back at him as Al-Qaida's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri mocked President Bush's plan to send 21,000 more troops to Iraq, challenging him to send "the entire army" and vowing insurgents will defeat them, according to details from a new videotape released by a U.S. group that tracks terror messages. Maybe W just wanted a second fiendish enemy in Iraq to continually attack to augment his role at the protector of the US. Rove must have convinced W that he needed someone other than bin laden--who W has never been able to capture, as a boogeyman, just for variety. Senator Biden has also recently pointed out that W's true goal in the surge is to keep the Iraq atrocity going until W's term is over. Whatever the reason for the Iraq War was-"whatever Congress voted for", W has failed. In his speeches, including his state of the union addresses, W is always lying about Iraq and we likely heard some whoppers in his most recent one, but we won't know what they are until the lies become apparent. The "whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure," statement certainly is in the English language, but it is emblematic of W's misuse of words to convey indecipherable sound-bytes, which he which he mislabels as policies. Such an evil maneuver destroys the role of the Congress' ability to provide checks and balances against W's insane executive branch of the US government, thus ruining the functioning of the US Democracy. As a consequence of lying about the pre-war Iraq intelligence, and all of the lies subsequent to that huge hypocrisy, W has failed the Democracies of both the US and Middle East.

Authors Bio:
Winston Smith is an ex-Social Worker. I worked in child welfare, and in medical settings and in homeless settings. In the later our facility was geared as a permanent address for people to apply for welfare. Once they received that we could send them to facilities in which their welfare paid the bill and provided enough for a meager existence. We also referred people to vocational rehabilitation services. Many of the people who came to us were people who were clearly emotionally ill, but Reagan's slashing of the services for these people caused them to become homeless. One woman I dealt with-St. Jane, believed she was in direct communication with God, urinated freely without using the facilities and she had 47 bags of trash which were prized possessions. She got welfare and was sent to a facility were she could survive. The rule was that our facility could be used 1 time only as we had too many people who thought that the services that we provided we would lift them from the dire straights that they were in. Well, we provided our services for St. Jane around Thanksgiving. On Christmas Eve she was back with her 47 bags of trash and wanted to stay at our facility. I informed my superior of this situation, but we declined to provide services for St. Jane. She slept in front of our facility in a snowstorm. The local rag took the picture and excoriated us for what we did. The local welfare department asked her where she would like to live. St. Jane said Chicago because she liked the wind. She knew on one there. She and her 47 bags of trash of were carted onto a train for the windy city and never of again. The local welfare department was glad to get shed of her. Social welfare in the mid-1980's was geared to blame the victim. Ill people were sent home from hospitals were no one was going to help them because social welfare budgets were slashed by Reagan. Bush 41's â"thousand points of lightâ" was just another way to shaft the weakest in our society. Bush 43's faith based initiative was just another attempt to reduce social welfare services. Reagan's â"Just say Noâ" was the pinnacle of hypocrisy. No services for those who desperately needed them under the guise of tough love.

Obviously I became burnt out by too much indifference regarding our weak and weary. I couldn't look at desperate people and could not get myself to say that what I could offer them wouldn't really help themâ"”it would only get them out of my office to be another person's problem, until the local welfare department carted them away.

I had little interest in politics until the illegal Iraq War started. Growing up in the 1960's caused me to understand that the GOP used war to attract right-wing extremists to vote for them. When â"Tricky Dick'sâ" secret plan to end the Vietnam War unfolded into elongating our presence there for 8 years I knew that I would never believe a GOP war-monger again. I dislike Obama's plan to escalate our presence in Afghanistan and see it as a craven attempt to placate the GOP. Maybe he'll reduce the GOP's attacks against him, but it will at the expense of alienating his base.

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